Hello! Welcome to this week’s edition of The Connected Church News, where we bring you the Top 5 Digital and Social Media News each week for Leaders of Nonprofits, Churches, Ministries and Faith-driven Entrepreneurs.

We know you are busy. And we know that most of you don’t have the time to search the big world wide web for the current news that is relevant to you.

That is why each week we bring you the Top 5 Digital and Social Media News that you need to know for this week and present it to you in a short video format.

This week we look at news items related to Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, YouTube and Hootsuite.

📰 Top 5 Digital & Social Media News

🗞️ News #1 – WhatsApp now has 2 Billion active users.

WhatsApp announced last week that they have hit the 2 billion users mark. This firms up WhatsApp’s position as the world’s number one messaging app.

The consistent growth that WhatsApp, and in fact every other private messaging app has seen, goes on to show how private media or the private-messaging-conversation space is becoming an important medium or media that you need to consider for growing your nonprofit or your ministry.

Whether you’re trying to reach a niche audience, a very focused group of people or you’re trying to reach a global audience, the private messaging strategy is going to be playing a very important role in 2020 and beyond.

YouTube seems to be testing a new monetization feature that could help its creators earn more revenue from their videos. And this feature is called ‘Viewer Applause’, which is basically clapping for a video.

You look at a video, if you like it, you can add a clapping animation. People will be able to purchase this clapping animation and place it over the video that they choose to support. This is a feature that’s already popular in platforms like Twitch. So YouTube seems to be adopting that.

YouTube has been saying that they are testing out different or alternate monetization methods to help their creators earn more revenue. This feature is currently being tested in a few markets like the United States, Australia, Brazil, India and after the test it should roll out globally. As of now, it’s available only on the desktop.

And to mark that day, Instagram made a series of announcements about how they have made their platform safer and the steps they’re taking towards that.

I wanted to pick two things that I wanted to bring to your notice from that announcement.

First is, they have come up with a streamlined transparent process for people who are reporting the content on Instagram. So if someone reported, now they can go to a section called ‘Support Requests’ inside Instagram that will tell people what the status of their report is, and what action has been taken. And if they don’t agree with that action, they can actually submit it for review again.

The second thing which you might want to pay attention to is the disabled accounts. If at all an account is disabled, earlier they had to go through the Instagram help center to revoke it. Now, there is an in-app option that is coming where people can request a review of that decision and appeal that decision to get their account back.

🗞️ News #4 – Facebook launches a new app ‘Hobbi’, which looks a lot like Pinterest.

Facebook’s NPE – New Product Experimentation team has come up with a new app called ‘Hobbi’, which is a photo and a video-sharing app that has been designed to help people organize and document their personal projects and hobbies.

So if you’re interested in cooking or arts or cars or something like that, you can organize your images and videos based on what your hobbies are.

Now, that sounds a lot like Pinterest! So it will be interesting to see how this new app performs in the app stores.

Our final news of this week is a big one about a global digital report that is published by Hootsuite.

This particular report is a very popular report among industry professionals. It carries a lot of statistics and it’s a very detailed report. Now Hootsuite has released an updated version for the year 2020.

And this report has some very interesting statistics and shows how significant social media is becoming. It says 4.5 billion internet users are there around the world. And out of that 4.5 billion, 3.8 billion are social media users. And the report also says one-third of the total time that people spend on the internet is on social media.

There are lots and lots of statistics that you can dig into. In fact, the report has details for multiple countries, more than 200 countries. As leaders of nonprofits and ministries, it’s important for us to stay on top of trends, and that too current trends. So do check it out.

That’s all we have for you this week. Thank you for spending your time with us.

Have a wonderful week!

Do leave your comments, questions, feedback, and reviews. You can also email me: podcast@natchilazarus.com

We will bring you a fresh set of the latest Social Media news for you next week.

Author of The Connected Church. Social Media and Digital Marketing Consultant for Nonprofits, Faith-based Organisations, Churches and Ministries. You can subscribe to Natchi’s email newsletter by clicking here.